Verizon finally made Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) available for my HTC Thunderbolt yesterday. Of course, a newer version of Android (4.1 Jelly Bean) is already on the streets, but at least I got some love…. Anyway, I jumped on the upgrade. It took three tries, and well over an hour for the download/installation process to complete. ICS is a pretty decent upgrade over what I had been running (2.something-or-another). One of the things that was part of the new OS was a significant upgrade to the stock Camera app. The new app includes some of the things everyone is used to in a digital camera — in camera effects and different shooting modes.

I made this image in my dark office, with the ISO set to auto, and using the new “Close Up” photo mode. I’ve got the phone setup so that camera files are automatically uploaded to my dropbox account. So, within a few seconds, the image was available on my little laptop. I opened the image in Fotor (a freebie Windows8-native photo editng app) and did a slight crop, and then added the high-contrast Lomo effect, as well as the border and watermark.

Straight from the camera, the few images I’ve taken look better — noise seems better controlled, and the focus looks better. I’ll play around with some of the new photo effects later. They look pretty well thought out.

I also re-joined Instagram, for what that’s worth.

Related articles

• HTC Thunderbolt finally gets Android 4.0 upgrade
• Android 4.0 officially rolls out to HTC Thunderbolt
• Two-year-old Android phone receives 15-month-old software update
• HTC Thunderbolt Gets Android Ice Cream Sandwich Update

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